My views on fair use and the future of the internet struck a major chord at the Take Back America panel on "Blogs : The new insurgency" [1] because I spoke about the realities of blogging politics as a business and as a form of activism and was not going to bow to the pre-packaged sound bites of "we are taking back the Democratic party" or the "we have changed politics for good" that people like Matt Stoller are so ready to spechify on these conferences.
Yes, some changes have come. If you want to count the fact that the blogs published by a Puerto Rican black feminist and their contributors are getting quoted in major media; then, yeah, it's a sign of change. But it's only the beginning.
I am not going to bullshit people about what needs to be done because I am not doing this to run for office of get a job as a political consultant for candidate X. I blog because I want to go beyond effecting politics. I want to help build a network of activists who use effectively the internet for social change. The kind of change that creatively effects the very cultural infrastructure of our democracy through heavy doses of progressive libertarian dissent.
Yeah. I do want to change the world. I'm not interested in sounding good for the next job.
I had people stopping me for questions about the issues I raised there; the most important being that in order for progressives to truly empower a blog insurgency we need to own the pipelines to the internet from IP to hosting to open source companies. That there are decades of digital insurgency before the blogs came on the scene and if we don't learn from past experiences and mistakes progressives will never be able to effectively use this very itsy bitsty bit of new media to truly Take Back America [2].
By the way, most of the people who came to me were women. Not only did they thank me for keeping it real; but they were impressed with the fact that I was the only who could fluently talk about the technology issues surrounding blogs. That in a panel that had two guys who called themselves the face of "net neutrality" and the "netroots".
Sigh.
I will be putting up the podcast in a minute but I wanted to update you one bit of alarming news that supports my points of contention and another one that that made my whole effing year.
First the good news.
Word has gotten to me that yours truly had the Getty Images [3] lawyers and executives panties in a bunch. I am told by my sources that they haven't had this much fun in all the years they've been working at the company. It's seems my writing about the stupidity of exclusives [3] had the bosses internally debating their strategy and well, getting pissed off at the fact that maybe, just maybe, I made sense.
Heh.
I know from published reports on Yahoo!News that Getty Images lawyers were adamant about muscling bloggers with the DCMA (I'm too lazy to look up the link). Here's the link :
[via Shiloh Not Ready For Close-Up, Gets It Anyway - Yahoo! News [4]]:
As for Getty Images, which Pitt and Jolie announced earlier this week would market the photos, they claim the picture could be seen more as a teaser, enticing the celeb-savvy public into seeing the rest of the shots."Our legal team are looking into it and we will take it from there," spokeswoman Alison Crombie told Reuters. "But I really don't think it will devalue the pictures as everyone is dying to see the full set."
I am going to speculate that they were pushed by TimeWarnerAOL lawyers to follow in on their footsteps or else. And I am going to speculate we will be hearing more about the evil TimeWarnerAOL empire now that the debate over net neutrality vs. DMCA is getting not just heated up here but exported and imposed on other countries.
Which takes me to the bad news.
This appeared today on the Washingotn Post (which, btw, seems to have move all their publishing operations to the open source, free to copy and distribute, WordPress [5]) :
U.S. Joins Industry in Piracy War [6]
Overseas, U.S. government officials say, it is in the national interest to work on behalf of Hollywood and other entertainment and intellectual property industries.
Read the whole damn thing and then come back to me later. What I get from this post is that the United States has successfully found a way to institutionalize censorship by way of exporting their fucked up legislation on intellectual property law. And yes, you read it right. I am equating intellectual property law with censorship.
For centuries artists, scholars and creatives of all kinds have fed from each others ideas to create new ones. Intellectual property law basically is a way for corporations to say we own not just the thoughts and ideas produced by our indentured creatives; but we own all thoughts and ideas derived from them.
Corporations could own goods and then the services related to those goods through patents and trademarks before the digital age because they created tangible and material things. And after slavery, being indentured to the company, to the corporation, whether through blue or white collar sweat shops or the mythical golden cuffs that paved the way to the American dream, was easy to enforce since you could control the bodies of your workers and what they produced through factories and office buildings.
In the digital age its only ideas and their representation in electronic anima that's all to be had. And you don't even need humans to manufacture your goods anymore : the new manufacturing plants can be as sexy as a Photoshop or Audium program and the scrascrapers full of scribes have been transformed by MSOffice.
To claim exclusive ownership on digital images, sounds, texts and services and all their derivatives is to plainly claim ownership of thought and creativity. The lawyers of the RIAA, TimeWarner AOL and all the corporations vowing to clamp down on so called piracy now it and are ready to fight for the right to control what you and me and anybody else has to say or with their products --whether these products are humans in the guise of pop culture stars, books, movies, songs, or anything else they claim to have exclusive ownership on.
Lest I am not being clear : Intellectual property law is one step back and and step closer to a new kind of slavery.
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